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Topic: "lost beer" (Read 2098 times)

I must say I'm amazed at the stories at lost beer on these boards. I brew a minimum of 20 gallons a month, and havn't lost a beer yet. (I'm hoping to someday) Maybe it's because I'm so anal about storage and label everything, and know which is oldest beer. Or, maybe it's because I drink too much, there's no time to lose anything. I just got a small chest freezer that will eight corny's, so maybe I'll have a better chance now...... I've got it half full, with still two corny's in my serving kegerator. Brewed two, ten gallon batches this past weekend. (but probably drank half that, LOL)

It's fun and interesting to discover a beer you didn't know you had tucked away. It's only happened to me twice...fortunately both times the beers were ones with a higher ABV: a couple bottles of my Christmas ale that escaped my gift-list and got laid aside for 5 years, and a few bottles of a Scotch Ale I made in or around 1994. I've sampled them with surprisingly good results...the last one I tasted was a bottle of the Scotch Ale, which I opened last year (and I still have 1 bottle left). I was shocked at the depth of the malt character that still remained after all that time in the bottle (and it was bottled after spending 8 months in bulk in the Cornie)...perhaps thanks to the proportion of Munich I used, it was still a very rich tasting beer. I'm sure the relatively high OG (1.086) helped it to hang in there for so long.

Since discovering those bottles some years ago, I have now begun regularly laying aside a couple 22 ouncers of stronger brews that I thought came out particularly well, just to see how they fare some years down the line.

I have a freezer kegerator that holds 6 cornies for serving and a fridge that holds up to 6 cornies for lagering/carbonating so that when I need a keg in the kegerator there's always one ready to go. So my lost keg had just been in the fridge for a year hiding out with all the others